MEDIA: The Revolutionary and the Fat Lady

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Alejandro Kirk

LISBON, Aug 13 1999 (IPS) - The “last eclipse of the millenium” was not the only thing this week that overshadowed the death of Portuguese lieutenant colonel Ernesto Melo Antunes, so did the death of English cook, Jennifer Patterson.

Melo Antunes, the mind behind the 1974 “carnation revolution” that ended Portugal’s 48-year dictatorship, received just five lines of print – without headlines – at the end of a 48-line story dedicated to Jennifer Patterson in the ‘International Herald Tribune.’

Spain’s ‘El Pais’ newspaper, on the other hand, dedicated an entire page to Melo Antunes, but not one line to Patterson.

Patterson achieved fame on a BBC television cooking programme called “Two Fat Ladies,” which since 1996 had promoted the abundant use of butter, fat and red meats in cooking.

From descriptions in the press, we know that the only things Melo Antunes and Patterson had in common were addiction to cigarettes, and their deaths on the same day (Tuesday, Aug 10), as a consecuence of the same disease: lung cancer.

But, innocent of the hierarchies and priorities of the “global” press, each characterised – in their own way – a rebelliousness against the inflexible dominant values of this era of globalisation, which to many is grotesque.

Melo Antunes died, for example, believing that democracy is obligated to guarantee social equity, while Patterson ended her days decrying the repression of the U.S. “health police” who prohibit much more than they permit.

In the summer of 1975, as Portugal was consumed in revolutionary turmoil, Melo Antunes took on a controversial roll by opposing the most radical wing of the Armed Forces Movement at the risk of starting a civil war.

But while some celebrated the possible return to military authoritarianism, Melo Antunes surprised everyone again when he explained on television that the military’s goal was a broader democracy and deep economic and social changes, not more persecutions.

“His moderate stance was decisive given the totaliarian threat we faced,” in 1975, commented former socialist president, Mario Soares, at Melo Antunes’s funeral.

Jennifer Patterson and her colleague Clarissa Dickson starred in the programme “Two Fat Ladies” since 1996, produced by the British channel BBC, and won immediate success in Great Britain as well as the United States by playing out what are probably everyone’s secret worries.

Though the idea was the BBC’s – the two women did not know each other beforehand – both began to develop a language that the “Herald” described as “eccentric” because they offered their audience the cholesterol-laden dishes they preferred in their own homes.

The “Herald” journalist wrote – and not without a bit of alarm – that in one programme called “Meat” the cooks presented a recipe that included “beef wrapped in bacon, lamb stew, steak and fried chicken.”

Patterson blamed the North Americans for the fear of red meat and fat that has spread throughout all England, according to the newspaper, “as she drank vodka in a restaurant before going out to the street to smoke a cigarette before lunch.”

To smoke, drink and eat fatty foods in public, in certain places, at times requires a strong dose of bravery. Even for someone who is fat and does not suffer complexes. A dose of bravery is also needed to criticise the market economy.

But Melo Antunes was a military officer better known for his love of books than of weapons or discipline. He was the author of the Portuguese revolution’s ideological manifesto of April 25, 1974, and enjoyed long after-dinner conversations.

“He was, of course, a hardened smoker, a big fan of Galoises – black tobacco, without filters, the strongest in the world,” recounts Chilean journalist Mario Dujisin, who became a friend of the then artillery major during the height of the revolution.

“I have never seen an officer so uncomfortable in his uniform. It looked bad on him. History expert Cesar de Oliveira, who died last year, used to say that Melo Antunes in uniform looked like a transit cop in Lisbon’s worst neighbourhood,” adds Dujisin.

Unlike the other military officers involved in the coup, once Portuguese democracy had been established, Melo Antunes dedicated himself to intellectual activities. He joined the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) as under- secretary general from 1986 to 1991.

He also played a decisive role in the democratic consolidation of the European continent. The Portuguese example opened the way for democracy in Spain and Greece, and with it, the admission of western Europe’s three poorest countries (in addition to Ireland) into the European Union.

It is unlikely Patterson will have the same historic transcendence as Melo Antunes, despite the “Herald Tribune’s” and the BBC’s extensive coverage of her death. Though millions of British and U.S. television viewers recognise Patterson, but they will probably never know who the Portuguese military man was.

The parallel figures of an anti-military officer and a fat cook who drinks, both smokers who died of lung cancer, are symbols of non-conformism in an era of fear, uncertainty, abstinence, racial intolerance, bombings, and a single ideology.